Mindfulness: Foundation for Teaching and Learning.The Eighth Annual Mindfulness in Education Network (MIEN) Conference at the University of Colorado in Denver.June 26-28, 2015Denver, CO For more information, click here.

I was working in a 6th grade classroom where over 50% of the students had ADD, ADHD or were achieving well below grade level. The mindfulness lesson I had planned to teach that day involved heartfulness and sending kind thoughts. A new boy, who up to this point had been pretty quiet, raised his hand.

Continued from newsletter...He looked at me with a long face and said he wanted to send kind thoughts to his sister because he punched her when she took the remote control from him. I guided him to imagine his thoughts traveling from his heart to hers. He looked up at me with concern and asked, "How will she get the message I'm sending?" No one had ever asked me that question. As I paused for a moment to construct an answer, I heard a voice call out from behind, "She'll just feel it, heartfulness is a feeling she'll get." I turned around to see who offered this wisdom, and was surprised at the unexpected source.

At that moment I realized two things. Number one, I don’t always have to come up with the exact answer. Instead I can just invite the students to have a discussion and share. And number two, I saw I had been holding judgments about the student who had given his insightful response. Since he squirmed a lot and talked out of turn, my perception was that he wasn't really getting much out of our mindfulness time together. But that clearly wasn't true.This experience reflected back to me how essential it is for me to continue with my own daily mindfulness practice and practice what it is I teach. Kristin Ervin

Are you looking for a road map to transform K-12 education? This 85-page pocketbook is a wonderful quick study on how a triple focus on “inner, outer and other” has the power to

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bring substantive change to the way that education is delivered to children. Daniel Goleman, author and founder of the concept ‘emotional intelligence’ defines key elements to each of the three focus areas. Business leadership guru, Peter Senge, adds his wisdom about the interrelatedness of the triple focus to systems thinking. Goleman and Senge integrate social emotional learning (SEL) and Systems Education into a well-parsed treatise about the interdependence of our existence. They contrast this approach to our current system in education and heavy reliance on reductionistic thinking . While they argue that both synthesis and analysis are important for education and its reform, it is the interconnections between people, object and the planet that may matter more than ever before to enable our collective well-being. A set of 3 CDs of guided mindfulness practices can be bought as a package with this fast read at a great price. Mary Spence, PhDYou can click here to get this book through Amazon Smile program and designate .05% of your purchase as a donation to benefit MC4ME.

This study describes the results of a 36 hour mindfulness based training program (MT) with 113 elementary and secondary school teachers. It is one of only a handful of well-designed studies that have assessed the impact of mindfulness ...

Continued from newsletter....training with educators using a randomized control research design and larger sample size sample. Participants who enrolled in the study were offered mindfulness training during or after the completion of the study (known as a wait-list control).

The type of MT that was implemented was a fully manualized instructional curriculum developed by the Impact Foundation (Cullen & Wallace, 2010), known as the SMART-in-Education program. It incorporates 70% of the same components and practices as the mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) program developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn, augmented by content to deal more specifically with different emotions and kindness and compassion. The MT is largely experiential in nature, using specific mental training exercises, such as concentration on thoughts or the breath, homework practices, such as assignments of daily sitting practices and monitoring emotional and behavioral responses, small-group activities to practice skills in real-life scenarios, and group-based discussions. The program in this research study was delivered over 11 sessions in an eight week period of time in two different cities in the US and Canada.

The authors examined a number of outcomes pre and post training and at 3 months follow-up, although some of the measures were not all implemented at both sites. For those standardized measures assessed in both locations, a few significant changes were found between the control and randomized groups. Teachers who received MT showed a significant increase in mindfulness and significant decrease in teacher burn-out at program end and follow-up when compared to those who had not yet received the training. Furthermore, mindfulness at program end was found to mediate the effect of burn-out; that is for those teachers who experience higher levels of mindfulness, the impact of any felt-sense of burn-out in the future is lessened. The authors conclude that mindfulness training has promise for improving teaching and learning in public schools by providing teachers with internal psychological resources for self-regulation to manage classroom demands and consequences of occupational burnout. Rita Benn, Ph.D.